The necessity for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has recently received a great deal of attention due to factors such as shortening of the product life as varieties of products are produced, and customer's orientation to customized services as the use of the Internet spreads. These methods try to raise the customer satisfaction, win new customers, and keep customers.
One-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing which creates a database of individual attribute information including the age, gender, hobby, preference, and purchase log of a customer, analyzes the contents of the database, and makes a proposal complying with customer's needs. A typical method of this marketing is variable printing. These days, a variable printing system which customizes a document for each customer and outputs the document has been developed along with the development of the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) technique and the pervasion of digital printing apparatuses. The variable printing system needs to create a customized document in which contents of a different amount for each customer are optimally laid out.
Generally, when such a customized document is to be created by the variable printing system, containers are laid out in a document. The container is a drawing area for drawing contents (drawing contents (e.g., an image and text)), and is also called a field area.
A desired customized document can be created by performing work of laying out containers in a document and associating a database with the layout (associating various contents in the database with the containers). The contents of the customized document can be changed (made variable) by properly switching contents in the containers in the customized document (changing the association). Such a document is called a variable data document, and a printing system using the variable data document is a variable printing system.
In a conventional variable printing system, the size of a container associated with a text or image serving as contents is fixed. When contents in the database are inserted (flowed) into a container and the data amount is larger than the container size, the following problems arise. That is, if the data is a text, overlapping of the text in the container occurs. If the data is an image, clipping of the image by the container occurs. When the data amount is smaller than the container size, no proper display may be obtained such that a gap appears between the container and its internal contents.
In order to solve these problems, there is proposed an automatic layout system. The automatic layout system can flexibly set the container size of a container laid out in a document. Software which implements the automatic layout system can change the container size in accordance with, e.g., the data amount to be inserted.
There is also proposed a technique of, when a text to be inserted into a container of a fixed container size cannot fall within the container size, changing (in this case, reducing) the font size of the text and displaying all the text within the container.
In an environment where the content size is flexible, when a container becomes large depending on contents to be inserted, the container overlaps another container in the same document. In an environment where the font size is flexible, the font size becomes excessively small when the data amount of text to be inserted is very large.
As another automatic layout technique for solving these problems, a technique of changing (in this case, reducing) the container size of a container adjacent to a target container when the container size of the target container increases is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658 “Layout Designing Apparatus”.
The variable printing system using the conventional automatic layout technique can shift the container position or change the container size, but cannot provide a completely different layout.
For example, the above-mentioned one-to-one marketing provides a brochure or catalog of different contents to each customer, and content data to be flowed greatly changes depending on the customer. If this requirement is to be satisfied by only the conventional technique, the container position may greatly shift or the container size may greatly change. That is, since only preset layouts are used, a brochure or catalog of a design greatly different from one intended by the user may be created.